Theory 1 of 5: "Signals are created and emerging trends are found within the unintended purposes of a channel."

1. EMERGING
Social Media
Trends, Tools &
Technologies
@ johnvlane
Thanks for coming to the session
John Lane - VP, Strategy & Creative at Centerline Digital
- A content marketing agency right here in Raleigh
- Working with IBM, Lowe’s, John Deere, Google and local companies
- On comprehensive, sustainable digital marketing
- Getting people to do things with your content
Not a guru, ninja, Jedi... a practitioner
- Implementing the appropriately creative solutions
Emerging is tough - the cutting edge for one is the trailing edge for others
- Most people who are actually using what you implement... they’re not on your
level either
- Hope everyone walks out thinking about at least one thing a bit differently

2. Social Channels Weren’t Made For You
@ johnvlane
Social media channels weren’t made for you (publishers and marketers)
- But that’s okay. TV, radio, the internet... they weren’t made for you either
- There’s history there... audiences define mediums
- You can — and should — find a way, because it’s what people want now
Social media has eclipsed porn as the #1 “content” on the web!
So...

3. Focus On Purpose, Not Technology
Flickr Photo by stevecadman
@ johnvlane
To succeed, start with matching your business purpose to the natural flow and
population of the channel.
You’ve probably heard that a lot today... bet you’ll hear it even more tomorrow.

4. Theory 1:
Signals are created and
emerging trends are found
within the unintended
purposes of a channel.
@ johnvlane
Theory1: Unintended purposes are where trends are created.

5. @ johnvlane
If you haven’t used it or heard of it yet...
- Instagram is essentially a way to turn your iPhone into a Polaroid camera...
- and immediately share your shots with the world.
Instagram has 2 million users.
- They got them in less than 2 years.
It took them 10 months to hit 1 million.
- It took Twitter 2 years to do so.
They don’t even have a website.

6. One of these things is
not like the others...
@ johnvlane
On the surface, Instrgram may not feel fundamentally different than Twitter, Facebook
and Google+
- A social channel in which people share short posts about life.
- They all have the same image posting capabilities.
The difference is in specificity.
It’s all about seeing how others are exploring the world.

7. @ johnvlane
So... how did ABC decide whether they should use the Lomo-Fi, Apollo or 1977 filter?
This doesn’t feel so “fun and quirky.” But it does feel “right.”
ABC World News has around 83,000 followers on Instagram.
3.5% of total population.
They have 304,447 fans on Facebook.
Apx .03% of total population.
It’s about a natural flow of information vs making people find a destination.
- How do you find your news?
- Go to a news website? See it in a feed?

8. @ johnvlane
How other brands are using the platform.
Other things go into this, but you can look at how some are using it versus others to
learn the right way to enter the stream.
“Successes.” Red Bull - 72k following - a lifestyle stream
“Failures.” Sharpie - 2,300 following - a product catalog
- Why not feature “user” art?
- Dipika Kohli — Sharpie art showings...
Gucci, CNN, GE, Threadless.
All have taken different tacks to using Instagram, some with more success than
others...
- Because they understand what people are looking for there.

9. @ johnvlane
Another string of that theory is the idea of customer service on Twitter (or other
platforms).
Different approaches to the same (still) emerging principal:
- Early: Customer service needs to happen where the customers want (most still go un-
touched)
But so many brand “complaints” go unnoticed still.
- 95% of comments on brand sites are unanswered.
- 71% of comments directed toward a company on Twitter are ignored.
- Now: Our business is a customer service business... how does social media fit
organically with our business philosophy?
DSW... BestBuy... Zappos
So the “trend” is still finding it’s sweet spot... the approach is still evolving.

10. Respect Desired Paths.
Flickr Photo by wetwebwork
@ johnvlane
What to take away from this:
- Respect People’s Desired Paths
- Find new ways to match your message with what your specific audience is primed
for

11. Theory 2:
The strands of market
research and marketing
are converging within
social media channels.
@ johnvlane
Trend: The strands of market research and marketing are converging in social media.

12. Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle
@ johnvlane
Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle.
- It’s not as complicated as you may think
- The relevance to marketing in today’s digital marketplace is fairly clear
In a nutshell, the Principle states
- Certain physical properties like position and momentum cannot both be known to
arbitrary precision.
- In fact, the more precisely you know one property, the less precisely you know the
other.
This relation describes the current challenge of triangulating market research and
marketing on the increasingly transient nature of today’s consumer:
The more time you take to figure out exactly what potential customers (and even
more important, your evangelists) want or think, the narrower your fractional window
of time to put that knowledge to work in the marketplace.
The market will have moved on to something else.
Conversely, merely giving lip service to consumer insights or ignoring them entirely
creates a perilously wide band of uncertainty for marketing initiatives.

13. @ johnvlane
Most everyone has heard about the Old Spice “Responses” campaign; it’s the perfect
example of convergence.
It was both marketing genius and research machine.
70 videos in near real-time response... a conversation.

14. “We’re looking at who’s written those comments,
what their influence is and what comments have the
most potential for helping us create new content.”
Iain Tait
Global Interactive Creative Director at Wieden+Kennedy
@ johnvlane
The system created was an immediate feedback loop.
What resonates? Change on the fly and learn.
Different audience, different question, different response... same brand and time
frame.
George Stephanopolus and Alyssa Milano.
How did it get applied back into the real world?
- Great sales
- Continued buzz
- The behind the scenes video
- People wanted to learn how they did the commercials

15. @ johnvlane
Another attempt to harness real-time “research” for marketing:
- Kraft Mac and Jinx
Not as deep. But an interesting wrinkle in the trend.
How can you better combine your monitoring and measuring with marketing in real-
time?

16. Theory 3:
The ability to monitor, isolate
and measure actionable
insights about influence in
social media is growing...
if taken with a grain of salt.
@ johnvlane

17. Measuring Influence Is Hard
@ johnvlane
An exploration of why both monitoring and measuring are difficult.
And an exploration of why it’s important... there’s a lot of REACH illustrated here.
And you need to know about it to THANK people and CAPITALIZE on your hard work.

18. @ johnvlane
Klout and others like it are trying to make sense of this.
- A valid experiment, but hardly without fault.
Not the least of which are these:
- They still aren’t measuring offline WOM, which is still the huge majority - 90%
- The people running Klout are acting in their best monetizing interest, not yours.
- The systems can be gamed.
True influence is about changed/altered behavior and not reactions.

19. @ johnvlane
But...
There are still things you should take from it:
- It may help you glean some facts about who the population feels is influential about
certain topics.
- It’s a starting point.
But you can’t simply blast an email to “influencers” and expect them to jump on your
bandwagon because they are ‘apt to share and connect.’
- You have to start with a real connection.
The key is:
- How do you make those real connections so that you have clout (c) to
leverage later?
Hint: Engage more in the conversation rather than by trying to raise your Klout score.

20. @ johnvlane
Google+ Ripples
- An interesting charting, but without the “automated” and functional insight...
yet.
- That might be a good thing.
- It requires leg-work — you have a tool to see messages spread but it’s up to
you to figure out why.

21. A Side Note:
Google+ is an anomaly
that will either change the
landscape of social media
or be forgotten... or both.
@ johnvlane
Jobs to be done framework.
It’s an add-on service, rather than the original intent. (Google = Search... not Social)
- Facebook is focused, idealistically, on the connections between friends - the
platform.
- Google is focused on search, metrics, proof... the benefits of extensions.
The social aspect isn’t the central aspect.
An example: It’s blocked “crowd-sourced” evolution from the start. (Control)
But — the pervasiveness of search could be it’s biggest draw — for business.

22. @ johnvlane
Google+ has 30 million users.
They got them in approximately 2 months.
It took Facebook 2.5 years to hit that number.
It took Twitter 3 years to do so.
More on this in a minute...

23. Theory 4:
The idea of “local” has
shifted. But the power of local
(in situ) social interactions
and artifacts is growing.
@ johnvlane
What is local?
- If you’re thinking geography — applies greatly to mobile.
- But this is way beyond Foursquare, Gowalla, Etc.
In Situ — contextual locality — is more appropriate.
Either way, social artifacts are more important than ever in terms of reaching/
influencing an audience.

24. @ johnvlane
On the subject of local, social artifacts and search...
Siri is literally word of mouth.
Siri, Google and Yelp!
- Ratings and reviews are moving to a different level (in regard to iPhones).
15 million reviews on Yelp!
30-50 million total unique visitors to Yelp! every month
about 1/3 come from mobile browser/apps
46% of users are 18-34
35% of users make >100k per year
More than 2,216,896 calls were made from a Yelp app.
- That’s nearly 9 calls every 10 seconds to a local business.
A new photo is uploaded every 30 seconds via the mobile app
That’s a lot of stats...
The takeaway: get your butt on Yelp.
- Whether you’re a small local business, a doctor’s office or a marketing agency.

25. @ johnvlane
A different form of local — in situ — are apps like Get Glue and IntoNow.
These are apps that enable social interaction, focused on the TV content (or movies,
music, etc.) that people are engaged in right now.
Nielsen:
70% of tablet owners…
68% of smartphone owners use their devices while watching television.
Forrester:
50% are online while watching TV.
Access more information about the show/actor they area watching, tweet about the
tv show, consume social media and play games.
Or, like on IntoNow, the chat about the show.

26. @ johnvlane
Google+
Google+ Biz — Just getting started. A direct competitor to Facebook Pages.
Think about the Google owned extensions:
- Maps, YouTube (branded channels), local search, etc.
Hangouts. The next iteration of social channel customer service?
One of the downsides? Lock-down. The terms of service prohibit games, contents,
special offers and coupons from being offered directly on the pages.
- Less apps.
- Segmentation (ideally based on customer selection).

27. Create Word Of Mouth On Demand
Flickr Photo by 55His.com
@ johnvlane
Due to the nature of search (read Google),
- The +1 is a far more useful and powerful innovation than Google+ on the whole
And it might prove
far more powerful than Facebook's "like" as it's it tied to "open" search.
Create word of mouth on demand!

28. Theory 5:
The two most important
acronyms for the next few
years are not HTML5 or
CSS3, but RSS and API.
@ johnvlane
The two most important acronyms for the next few years are not HTML5 or CSS3, but
RSS and API.
This is the age of the developer.
(A place for GitHub?)
(The code that is creating the social web is in and of itself open and social.)

29. Content Curation
Flickr Photo by bram_souffreau
@ johnvlane
2 forces:
- people are more and more aware of brand beyond what you say it is...
- RSS/Atom/Etc. & bookmarking functions (Delicious/Tumblr/Diigo) make it possible to
port info
Curation of social assets is powerful.
Imagine you providing the topic sentence (context) to a world of ever-updating and
dynamic (social) content.
Context is king... content is the kingdom.

30. @ johnvlane
Some examples...
People’s brains don’t necessarily work in a linear fashion.
They look for stream-of-conscious, lose connections.

31. NYSE API
Careers page RSS
@ johnvlane
GE
90% of the content is syndicated. Why?

32. @ johnvlane
OpenGraph is one of the most powerful social API’s (for now). And it’s power is
growing.
Levi’s is an example of taking advantage of the opportunity of OpenGraph.
- So much more than a simple “Like”
This is social commerce... or syndicated commerce in the words of Brian Solis.
- 90% of all purchases are subject to social influence (online and off - Wired mag)
- 150 million people engage with Facebook via external websites each month
- 67% of people spend more $ online after seeing recommendations
A holistic shopping experience.
- Recommendations
- Endorsement
- Shopping with friends

33. @ johnvlane
Some of the new Facebook / OpenGraph features...
- Timeline - in beta and not yet available for businesses
But when it is available, imagine the power of a social, contextual timeline of artifacts.

34. @ johnvlane
Some of the new OpenGraph features...
- Actions and Objects
- Ticker
Consider Levi’s more. What would a brand app allow you to do?
- Share what you just put on.
- RFID embedded clothing that Tweets on it’s own?
- Might not be that far from the truth.

35. @ johnvlane
Art Of The Trench. Curating fans — letting them become a part of the story.
*Add Color
LoSoPhoMo (Thanks to David Armano)
- Location
- Social
- Photos
- Mobile

36. Taking advantage of trends...
Flickr Photo by Nils Geylen
@ johnvlane
This isn’t an exhaustive list... it’s a start. And there are good examples of them in
motion.
But like any forecast, actual conditions may vary.
Adjust according to your goals and audience.
Start with matching your business purpose to the natural flow and population of the
channel.
In other words, put the STRATEGY before the TACTICS.

37. Thank you!
Learn more here: centerline.net
Connect here: twitter.com/johnvlane
And here: twitter.com/centerline
@ johnvlane
Thank you!
Let’s chat more...
——
If asked for who’s doing it right...
Ford:
- Fiesta Movement - consolidated/curated social media promotion leveraging
connectors
- Mustang - “like” to reveal — working in concert with like-minded fans
- Escape - Words With Friends game